2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting

February 21-26

The session invites a broad range of interdisciplinary papers addressing physical-biological interactions, aiming for an improved and more holistic understanding of marine ecosystems. Recently, new instruments and satellite technology have revealed unprecedented detail in the distributions of a wide variety of marine organisms, at both micro and large scales. For example, a microstructure profiler equipped with a new laser fluorescence probe resolves the highly intermittent organization of phytoplankton into millimeter-scale aggregates and larger-scale thin layers. At much larger scales, satellite observations processed by sophisticated algorithms capture phytoplankton community structure and cell size distributions. Physical oceanographic features, such as oceanic currents, jets, eddies, etc. also influence distributions and dispersal pathways of organisms, such as larval and adult fish, and other marine organisms. These patterns of organization impact our understanding of how organisms interact with the environment and with each other. Diverse tools are required to make comprehensive observations across the relevant spatio-temporal scales, and integrated bio-physical models are needed to understand and realistically represent the impact of physical-biological interactions. It is therefore important to bring together researchers working at the interface of their disciplines to encourage new multi-scale collaborative studies of marine ecosystems.